| Some brief thoughts on Catcher in the Rye |
[Jan. 28th, 2010|01:49 pm] |
J. D. Salinger is dead and I find I have a little to say. To wit – I don't like Catcher in the Rye. I tried reading it when I was young and something about it made me put it down. Then, later, when I was more experienced I managed to finish it and was able to identify my annoyance. Catcher in the Rye seems to me to be a story about rebellion that only the middle class could love. Which is its target audience, I suppose. But the Holden's rebellion struck me as being, well, phoney. Here's this middle class kid that got bounced out of prep school, has money for hotels and hookers and at the end of it he just enrolls in another prep school. Yeah, uh, wow, you got some real rebellion there, dude.
It touches on the subject of teen rebellion in a myopic and, to me, not terribly interesting way. I like a good story about existential angst, and I think quite a bit about how the world makes people crazy, but Holden's “rebellion” is the kind of rebellion that children of well-off people can do. He freaked out, sowed some wild oats, but at the end we have no reason to believe that there will be any lasting consequences of his actions. In September, a new school year starts.
For people born with a bit more social vulnerability, dropping out of school has more lasting consequences. Oh, sure, you might go on a bender, find a hooker and play with your little sister – but at the end of it, you can't just enroll in another school. It's not that easy. You're going to be faced with many immediate problems and many long term problems. For the poor, youthful rebellion defines their further existence. The consequences of one's actions can't just be swept up so easily.
Which isn't to say that talking about a middle class kid's rebellion is not legitimate. I offer this not to try to “correct” Salinger's work but to offer why I didn't find the book to thrilling. It speaks about people that I am not and, indeed, people I often have a great deal of trouble associating with. In short, I found the book to be unironically about a self-absorbed, sheltered idiot. I couldn't take his whining teen angst seriously as either a teenager or an adult, but the text demanded I do.
I also think the success of Catcher in the Rye says much about how classics are formed. For while I don't think the book is very interesting in large part because of my lack of identity with the protagonist, it has not passed my notice that the critics and professors and teachers who have created this book into a classic very much do come from that rather narrow category of white male middle class people that are most likely to identify with the book. |
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| Vegetables time! |
[Jan. 28th, 2010|01:56 am] |
Becky, a friend of mine, fairly recently opined that people like meat more because few people take the time to prepare vegetables as elaborately. She made the point that most of us prepare vegetables by, y'know, steaming them and maybe throwing on a little butter or salt or something similarly basic. That's . . . often true. We don't put as much effort into vegetables – at least, I didn't – as I do into meats and starches. I'm going to change that and part of the way I'm going to change that is by doing more canning. Just the other night, I was eating some salsa and figured I could do it cheaper and better. Today, I did it cheaper and better and now I have FIVE POUNDS of salsa.
But reflecting on that made me realize why many people, such as myself, go real basic with vegetables. With meats and starches, there's plenty of middle ground. Oh, sure, you can prepare extremely complex recipes with meats and starches, but you can also just throw a steak on the grill or steam some rice and pretty much everything in between. With vegetables, you basically go from “steaming” to “chopping for two hours”. Which takes us back to canning. If I'm gonna chop for two hours, I want a lot of food, either canned or in the freezer.
So, I thought about kimchi. Tasty and amenable to fairly large batches. I'll probably get a cookbook on Korean food at some point to see what other tasty things they have in it, but I first figured I'd see if it was the kind of thing I even wanted to do, so I Googled and found this recipe for kimchi.
What is it about Asia that makes people weird? So, a little ways down in the instructions, okay, this is a real instruction, it says, “As you wash the vegetables, focus on your inner cooking. As you prepare the food, prepare your mind. Recognize that the way you prepare this meal is the way you are preparing your life. Put your total energy and attention into it. Clean your mind of all surface troubles and tribulations, all worries and fears. Focus on this exact moment in time. Observe the colors and textures of the vegetables. Feel them in your hand. Relax. Connect with your purpose and with the purpose of those who will be eating this food. Recognize that you are preparing totally healthy, life-giving fuel. Feel the love that you are demonstrating for yourself and for others as you perform this important service. Smile inside. This is going to be great! Its going to taste awesome!”
I mean, in some ways, this is why I like to make things. I sorta do cook because it's preparing my life. And I don't so much clean my mind but allow the cooking to clean my mind, but I figure that if I said that this fella that he'd grok that. And I do it out of love, it really brightens my day when Adrienne comes into the apartment and gets a smile on her face because there's this wonderful smell coming from the kitchen.
But . . . is this a recipe or a self-help essay? I mean, other weirdness, “The hugging motion is gentle. Generate love while you're doing it. Its hard to overstate the importance of this step. Whenever we make Kimchi, it comes out good, but nearly as good as Grandmaster's. We're pretty sure that the missing ingredient is love.” Actually, I'm pretty sure the missing ingredient is not love but the reflex for students to believe their teachers are superior (and thus worthy of being teachers) which is often generalized to absurd proportions, particularly if you're callin' the guy “Grandmaster”.
This stuff strikes me as being terribly orientalist. In the header, which I first ignored to get to the recipe, he talks about his Grandmaster who taught him how to do this, some cat in Milpitas who teaches martial arts. Ugh. I know that cooking often creates this powerful nostalgic feelings but this is just . . . ugh, like I said, it smacks of orientalism, the strange, mysterious Orient where they do things DIFFERENTLY, with CHI ENERGY and . . . er, stuff. |
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| Andouille |
[Jan. 25th, 2010|03:02 pm] |
After I made some andouille, a friend said how he'd had some in France and it was pretty gross. I thought that odd because my andouille is pretty good. Well, I was looking through recipes and there is, apparently, considerable difference between French and Cajun andouille. Most particularly, Cajun andouille is made of pork shoulder butt and French andouille is made of minced pig intestines and stomachs. I bet that could really make up for the difference in tastes, hehe. |
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| Allergic to everything |
[Jan. 24th, 2010|01:19 am] |
Lately, I've been getting all coughy and such when I eat just about any prepared foods. I haven't narrowed it down with 100% certainty but I'm increasingly sure it's some form of preservative. When I eat the prepared form of something I make myself, I get all coughy for a while. It seems to be absent in baked goods, but present in sausages and canned vegetable products . . . though I know I'm allergic to citrus, which is in a bunch of stuff.
So, I'm thinking my solution is going to be to pretty much make everything. I mean, geez, this is starting to get a bit crazy. I mean, to the extent of getting a freezer so I can make large quantities of stuff and put 'em in a deep freeze, and canning my own sauces and snacks (pickles and such) and making pretty much everything in the household. Which will probably mean a marked reduction in the cost and a marked increase in the quality of the foods we eat but . . . still, as I look through the recipes for stuff like red sauce and sit here thinking about getting into making fresh cheeses and making feta out of them to avoid the crap in processed foods, I'm getting a very 19th century vibe. I wonder how far I'll need to go. |
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| Finished Hegel: A Biography |
[Jan. 23rd, 2010|03:29 pm] |
Finishing the bio on Hegel, I was caught by one thing in particular above all the rest. Hegel, pretty much the inventor of philosophy of history, a person with great interest in history and current events and political trends in Europe, whose entire philosophy was in some ways a justification for the inherent superiority of Western European Protestant republicanism, never mentioned imperialism.
That seems a rather big hole to me, and really is part of the reason I read the bio. I've read a fair bit of Hegel – in part to understand Marx and the broader currents of socialism, though I am neither a Hegelian nor a Marxist – including his Philosophy of History, but when I read his works it was without a broader context. Oh, I was vaguely aware that he lived in the first bit of the 19th century and was vaguely aware he was a Bonapartist, for instance, but when reading his works I read them without an eye to their historical context. I was thinking of their application to modern politics (and I found quite a bit of it wanting and some of it downright insulting and racist). But given his intent to create a philosophy that justified his modern history, of Western European Protestant nations (and France, he seems to have regarded France as an honorary Protestant nation and definitely turned a blind eye to its Catholicism), it now strikes me really, really weird that he ignores the large overseas empires of all the countries he loved the most – of the Netherlands, France and England. I also know that various German governments at the time were definitely feeling left out of the overseas imperialism end of things (which would eventually reach a head in the Treaty of Berlin in 1880 when the Prussians had conquered the larger part of what we now call “Germany”, though they were definitely thinking about it long before then). To simply ignore the role overseas empires had in the development of modern European states, the extent to which European riches and freedom were brought about by his imperialism, to the real and sustained detriment of the people living in the non-European parts of those empires (most shockingly chattel slavery and the systematic attempts to addict China to opium, but also just the wholesale looting of foreign lands for European interests and the widespread attempts to destroy their culture) . . . I just find it amazing that anyone could ignore this for as long as Hegel did.
And not too long after Hegel's death, I know that Hegelians like Engels and Marx would create a Hegelian philosophy that paid a lot of attention to imperialism, and that modern Hegelians like Huntington and Fukuyama have addressed the subject from a more “centrist” Hegelian position. So I know it's been addressed, but I now find it quite odd that Hegel, himself, never so much as mentioned the existence of these overseas empires when he fairly often mentioned the places that were part of those empires (though often quite dismissively).
That said, what I learned is Hegel lead a pretty boring life but the book accomplishes it's goal to help contextualize Hegel's life in his times. I can't recommend it unless you have an interest in Hegel, but if you do have an interest the book is quite readable. |
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| Odds and ends |
[Jan. 21st, 2010|11:43 am] |
The “not reading news” thing is really working out for me. I don't know if it's made me spend more time doing useful things, but I have spent less time ranting about the stupid things I had been reading almost constantly online. I honestly do not feel less informed about things. I suspect in a couple of weeks I'll get some Sunday paper delivered so I can keep myself “informed”, but for right now, I'm pretty comfortable getting my news from the Daily Show and whatever might float by from people linking or talking about things.
More generally, we're in the middle of waves of “bad” weather. There are waves of weather fronts – I refuse to call them storms – moving in from the Pacific which will keep me damp for about the next three weeks, so the days will be short, the weather dark and I won't be able to lift. Needless to say, this has amped up my seasonal affective disorder. Amped up sounds wrong. You amp up something that makes you feel down? I'm sure you get the drift. It's dark, I'm blue, suck! Still, better than Maine, where there would be shorter days and it was grayer longer. And in Maine during the winter, the clear days were the coldest ones, ugh. How about that for an antechamber to hell experience for a desert rat? When it's bright, it's windy and cold!
I might be getting a morbid fascination with traditional Icelandic food. Not to eat, no, because it might be the singularly most repulsive foodstuff that I've ever heard of. Hitherto, it had been Aztec food. The standard Aztec food was essentially this corn meal that you rolled a ball and let rot. Then you'd mix it up into a rotten corn ball slurry, throwing in some chili peppers, and (I assume) hold your nose and power chug that bad boy before you realized you were drinking rotten corn slurry with jalapeno. I mean, I understand that they lived in a hot climate and all but that sounds pretty fuckin' gross. Well, Iceland has them beat.
One of the traditional foodstuffs of Iceland is this stuff called hakarl – it has some squiggles in it that I'm not bothering to put in 'cause I don't have a Euro-keyboard and don't know how to make squiggles over things – which is described as “putrefied Greenland shark”. It was prepared, back in the day, by dressing a Greenland shark and burying it for six to twelve weeks, then cutting it into strips and drying it. It apparently smells like cleaning products, literally of ammonia. Eating it is supposedly a test of manhood. They need a better test.
Or stuff like the testicles of rams that are pressed into blocks, boiled and cured in lactic acid . . . let me 'splain about lactic acid curing. Because there's not a lot of salt in the horrorama that is Iceland, they would make this soft, yogurty cheese and then let the resulting whey ferment, which gets acidic, and then they'd boil stuff and put it in the fermented lactic acid. Apparently this technique was known, briefly, in mainland Scandinavia, but they gave it up pretty fast. I can only presume because it was so gross. So a lot of Icelandic food was preserved that way. Boiled and then put into a vat of fermented whey. Meats prepared in this fashion have a taste and consistency that is compared to those runny, stinking French cheeses – their MEAT was like this.
And just other stuff. Like when the warm period of the Middle Ages ended – five hundred years ago – they couldn't grow any grains. So they had to have their grains shipped from overseas (usually Denmark), which made grains sort of a luxury item. So when they made their bread, they had to do stuff like put seaweed and lichen in it to make the grain stretch. This is the kind of place we're talking about, where barley was a luxury item.
And the first vegetables weren't grown in Iceland until the late 17th century. Not “vegetables became common in the 17th century” but that some rich people built experimental vegetable gardens in the late 17th century. Vegetables didn't become reasonably common in Iceland until the second half of the 20th century. So, most of the population for most of its history never ate any fruits or vegetables.
Taken together, it makes that Aztec diet look pretty good. I mean, sure, the rotten corn slurry sounds loathsome and I'm sure it was. But the Aztecs had pretty good access to fruits and vegetables, not the least of which was various chili peppers, which were considered a staple. I understand this. They also had beans and a lot of squashes which were eaten in pretty normal ways. Oh, sure, in Tenochtitlan they also skimmed the foam off of their filthy lake to dry and season their food, but compared to rotten ammonia stinking shark or the rams balls made into cubes, boiled and tossed into the stinking whey fermentation vat until they turned a hideous white and smelled like a reject from a gooey Frankish cheese competition, hey, I'll take my chances with the Aztecs, y'know?
I kind of wish I could find a book on a food history of Iceland. Clearly, the harshness of the climate is what's responsible for these – to me – disgusting food habits. I bet how things got to that pitch would be a pretty compelling read for a guy like me. But, absent learning Icelandic, I'm pretty SOL.
The bio of Hegel is finally coming to an end. What I've learned is philosophers are boring people. Shocking, I know! The book is successful in the sense that it contextualizes Hegel's work with his life and the times he lived in, which is something I like because I feel (know in my own case) that when I read a philosophy text when I have a strong grasp of the time and culture in which the author lived I read it differently (and worse) when it's contextless. I know I'll never be able to get the feeling of a German living in 1830, having lived through Napoleon, the demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the various struggles between reaction and republican forces, but if I have some understanding about them I can more clearly comprehend the voice of the text. I might read Philosophy of History, again, after this (I don't know any force on earth could get me to re-read the Phenomenology or the Logic).
But reading it, I've sorta started to take the schools of literary thought that believe understanding the context of a work is irrelevant to the work as being self-serving. Like, you're some student in literature or philosophy and you've already got this crazy workload of books to read, like 200 pages a day of just boring, dry as dirt stuff. Oh, sure, it's important stuff filled with these really exciting ideas, but in general it's more fun to hit yourself on the head with a ball peen hammer than go through this stuff. If you're in literature, you get to read one good book and then punch through ten lousy books about it. If you're in philosophy, you get to read one good book ever (a couple more if you like Nietzsche; which is not praise for his philosophy so much as his incredible skill as a writer) and then a trillion ones that range from the mind bending to the inscrutable. Under such conditions, the need to understand the context of everything would be an added burden. (Which brings me back to Hegel. He's the guy who convinced me that philosophy and history can be understood together. Perhaps should be understood together. I'm not willing to go that far, normally, though I have thought it occasionally.)
I'm not saying that everyone should try to understand every context, but I find it sorta crazy to think that context isn't relevant. Literature has a history. Knowing that history is not a waste of time. I suppose I'm hopelessly backwards in some areas to think that, hehe.
Which is a long, rambling ass post about not too much in particular, mostly about horrible food. I can't really report much more because there's not much more to report. Other than the general blahs from the weather, I'm doing okay. Adrienne's doing okay at work. My biggest news is, in fact, more or less what I've reported on, hehe. Which means that my life is doin' pretty well. |
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| Dislikin' the term "people of color" |
[Jan. 19th, 2010|04:20 pm] |
I'm starting to dislike the term “people of color”. In a lot of Internet discussions about race, it seems inevitable that a “person of color” will chime in as an authority on race relations. But the term “person of color” seems . . . inadequate to me. I will say that the following is a US interpretation, but that's legit because most of these discussions have been taking place in a fairly American context.
All “people of color” are not discriminated against equally is what it comes down to, and the term “person of color”, it seems to me, lumps together people that have very different experiences vis-a-vis racism and discrimination. There are lots of “people of color” who are very well represented educationally, professionally, economically and politically. One would be really hard pressed to say that Japanese-Americans are seriously discriminated against in the United States. What does a Japanese-American have in common, really, with a black American? As a group, they're way more like white Americans.
Which is not to say that white Americans aren't culturally insensitive to Japanese Americans – but to lump together the experiences of Japanese Americans with the experience of black Americans is not real fair, either. (And we have all be the victims of culture insensitivity; attacks on rural Americans, especially those in agricultural fields - "rednecks" - is nearly constant inside of cities, f'rex.)
I say this because in the various conversations about racial issues on the Internet, it rarely happens that the “person of color” is part of a group that one can reasonably call discriminated or oppressed. They're not black, Mexican or Native American. They're from ethnic groups that do . . . really well in America and face no more discrimination than Italian-Americans (stereotype: greasy criminals) or Irish-Americans (stereotype: violent drunks) who still see nasty stereotypes all around them (it's hardly possible to find a movie about Italian-Americans that doesn't focus on organized crime, for instance, like gangsterism is all Italian-Americans have brought to us and only Italian-Americans are gangsters). You don't go to prison and see many of these “people of color” wildly overrepresented. You don't go into governments and see them wildly underrepresented. You don't go on college campuses and see them virtually absent. They're doing pretty well.
So, I'm starting to find the term “people of color” to be a little disingenuous. It's what a person calls themselves when they want to co-opt the struggles of actually oppressed ethnic groups. And it comes off ridiculous to me, as well as narrow minded and intensely selfish. It's not too different from those stupid white men on Fox News who whine and cry about their oppression.
So I've swapped out the term “people of color” as being at best a useless term that lumps together unlike things based on the deeply superficial grounds of darkness of skin and more likely, IMO, a way for non-oppressed groups to co-opt someone else's struggles for their own purposes for terms like “oppressed people” or “poorly represented people”, which more accurately describe what it is these discussions of race claim to be talking about. Because I think it's sorta sick for rich, well-educated people with ample representation economically and politically to lump themselves together with people who are actually oppressed. Y'know, so they can speak with false authority on Internet discussions about race . . . even if their experience is all ways closer to that of white middle-classed people than a poor kid living in a inner city ghetto, barrio or reservation. |
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| Not feelin' the computer graphics |
[Jan. 12th, 2010|04:39 pm] |
When Adrienne was gone, I watched pretty much every sci-fi Rifftrax there was – this included five Star Wars movies (all except Return of the Jedi) and three Matrix movies, plus a few more. I concluded a couple of things, chief amongst that CG has interesting limitations insofar as action scenes go.
When Kubrick showed a ship and a station with long shots, it was a cinematic miracle. About ten years late, the opening of a A New Hope – with the epic flyby of the star destroyer chasing Leia's ship – was cinematic brilliance. Because of CG, ever damn sci-fi movie in the universe now tosses about takeoffs, landings, flybys and such like we give a shit. It's not special any more! It's just a ship, it's just a station, it's just a landscape. I don't even know what kind of shot they are. I mean, they're almost never establishing shots, the vast CG panoramas, even the ships themselves, are often not vital to the action of the scene. They have all the narrative importance of parking, which is skipped in modern movies because parking is boring, even if the parking is done in some James Bond-esque supercar. But, damn it, they have CG and they're going to show it to you!
So, point number one of this rant: overuse of faux spectacular CG means that an actual scene or vehicle, no matter how common, now has more cinematic weight than battle cruisers and alien vistas. On virtue of a such a thing existing outside of a computer, on being something you could see when the theater goes dark, it has a weight that CG won't be able to match, at least, not very often.
It's even worse with action scenes. Recently I watched The Matrix Reloaded (remember, I had a Rifftrax). In the beginning of the movie there's this James Bondian stunt – a motorcycle is jumped from one building to another, a hot chick in plastic pants jumps off the motorcycle before it lands in a security station in an explosion and then there's some kung-fu. It was all very CG, even elements of the fight. The scene never had me, not nearly as much as the motorcycle stunts in, say, The Great Escape. Near the end of the movie, Steve McQueen's character rips off a Nazi motorcycle and there's a chase. This is before the CG, avid editing days, when to film a chase you pointed a camera at some moving vehicles and filmed the chase. So, the motorcycle shimmies around corners, fishtails, and there's a great stunt where McQueen jumps over a line of barbed wire that's twelve feet tall, tries it, again, on the next line of wire and gets caught. The big jump was, y'know, twelve feet or so of barbed wire. But it has oh-so-much more impact than the overedited CG mess that happened in any of The Matrix Reloaded's chases. I had something like the same experience in Deathproof where there is this smoking hot chase between two badass muscle cars, but it was all just cars and linear editing – you know, putting guys in actual cars and filming what happens.
Likewise, the finest martial arts action scenes are done with full motion techniques – Fist of Legend or Legend of the Drunken Master kind of stuff, or the stuff that Tony Jaa is doing in Thailand these days, you know, pointing the cameras at highly skilled athletes. When watching the CG killfests in the Star Wars and Matrix movies, despite the action being superhumanly wonderful, the CG-ness stole all the mass and impact.
Point the second: Everything being CG sorta removes tension. A friend, last night, said that watching The Matrix Reloaded was about as exciting as watching someone else play a side-scrolling video game. No only do the physics in CG stuff frequently behave . . . comically, shall we say, but the certain knowledge there is no car or motorcycle or whatever doing these wild stunts makes the . . . not wild. It makes them sorta boring.
BUT . . . man, who doesn't like The Incredibles or Kung-Fu Panda. Which leads to my third point: flatly animated movies easily avoid this. A well-directed action scene in an out-and-out animated movie seems to defy what I just said.
I think it's related to the Uncanny Valley. When you mix live action with superficially life-like action scenes, the impossibility of what happens juxtaposed against the otherwise real physics of the live action bits creates a disconnect. Is it real or not? And when the conclusion is, no, it isn't real, there can be some disappointment. As opposed to animation, which doesn't ever try to be “real”, it's not real from the outset, you know that, accept it and then you move on.
This isn't me arguing against CG, either. When used well, it can be really great. I watched Terminator 2 the other day, sort of the patient zero of this epidemic, and Cameron uses the CG really, really well. I hear he uses truly vast amounts of CG to great effect in Avatar. It can be done well. But it strikes me as something that's easy to get out of control. Action scenes are having more and more CG bits thrust in them, making them incoherently complex and confusing. Directors seem to think that, y'know, they spent tens of millions of dollars so you're going to see every fucking pixel of their CG. At great length. Damn it, THRILL to their spires and flying cars!
I also think that doing CG well is perhaps more difficult in many ways than doing live action. In live action, after all, there's this really sweet and consistent physics engine! In the big brawl in The Matrix Reloaded, Neo was knockin' Smiths (agent Smiths not the band the Smiths, though that would have been very amusing) around with a total disregard of classical mechanics. Either that or he was puttin' hella English on those light taps which qualified as “punches” in that scene. It just made no sense. It was just a punch. It would have just knocked the guy down, not hurled him in an orthogonal direction to the vector of the impact and forty feet into the air! So, since CG is often used because you can't do that with a heavily realistic, er, real, physics engine . . . uh, physics, because the CG is used to defy our common sense understanding of mechanics, of action and reaction, it often jumps straight into that Uncanny Valley where it looks . . . kind of real but not really believably real. Whereas animation, on virtue of having the physics be consistent and obviously unreal, the audience – or I do at any rate – find it easier to accept it for what it is. By not ever being real they never have to try to be real, which is more satisfying than the characters becoming CG puppets so they can be flung around in unbelievable ways.
But, that's all I have to say right now on the subject. |
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| Acta diurna delenda est! |
[Jan. 6th, 2010|02:01 am] |
I've stopped reading the news except, perhaps, on weekends. As in “none”. I noticed that when Adrienne was gone I didn't pay attention to news too much. When she's here, because I don't want to disturb her if she's “doing something” in the evening after we've eaten and socialized and such, I often find myself reading a fair bit of news . . . which then gets me angry. When Adrienne was gone? I didn't pay attention to news and was calmer. I think it's sorta sick to engage in behavior around the woman I love that I don't engage in when she's not around and makes me a less pleasant person around her. So, good-bye, news.
I don't even miss it. I mean, honestly? It's so dreary and banal and predictable. How many times and ways do I need to read about the same events, really? I'll be a couple of days “behind” things I can't do anything about? It's not like I'm a crusader for justice who organizes my life around protests and meetings. It's not like the things I have to say about current events isn't found deeply tedious by the few people who even listen to me about the subject. Like, y'know, Adrienne, who has been getting it first and worst. She knows what I think about this all, anyway.
Heck, if anything, reading a Sunday paper will keep me better informed. I'll get the articles after a couple of days of thinking has gone on. Like how I've resolved to read more books about current events, which has been wonderful because rather than getting some half-assed word dump made when a situation is confused and uncertain, I get some research and thoughtfulness.
Which is my news: the news sucks and I'm going to pare it down to the most useful (for me) format, a nice dense form. Absorb the information once a week, rather than continuously through the week. |
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| Political quietism |
[Jan. 1st, 2010|06:47 pm] |
Of late, I find I have a lot of strong opinions about things but not the will to speak aloud my thoughts. The Copenhagen fiasco, the impeding trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the exoneration of the Blackwater mercenaries of mass murder . . . I have terrific opinions about all these things, but I don't seem interested in discussing them.
I'm not sure if this is just a temporary weariness or a more significant abandonment of the very idea that discussing these things matters at all. Honestly, I don't think it does matter. I can't convince anyone of, I think, anything. The people with the wit to understand what I say seem more interested in defending the status quo (parroting one of the popularly positions) or proving their intellectual superiority . . . which I account a tragedy. That clever people, rather than banding together to be even more clever, instead squander our strength in idiotic attacks and frivolous refutations of each other!
Ah, well, fuck it. |
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| Demon Warriors! |
[Dec. 23rd, 2009|11:21 pm] |
Adrienne's not here, so I'm watching a bunch of movies I might not otherwise watch – crummy stuff, in large. Well, I just watched a so-so Thai action movie, Demon Warriors. I won't go through the fairly incomprehensible plot, but the upshot is that sometimes when a person commits suicide they are granted evil super powers. Then, they fight! At incredible length with awesome amounts of blood and death and carnage.
After the movie was done, however, there was some text on the screen – it was a moral message, cautioning people that suicide is a sin. Which, in many religions, it of course is, including Buddhism which is relevant to Thailand. I sorta sat there, stunned, that this hyperviolent, incredibly bloody movie is intended to be some kind of GI Joe morality story! “Remember, kids, if you commit suicide then you'll get evil super powers and die a horrible death, or, worse, you'll live a horrible life! Like these guys!” |
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| Was violence the only imaginable way to stop Hitler? |
[Dec. 21st, 2009|08:27 pm] |
I was reading this article about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, was mostly a defense of war. Hey, whatever, I know that Peace Prize is a joke. But in the speech and, then, in the article, both Obama and Uri Avnery say that non-violence “would not have stopped Hitler”. As Avnery goes on to point out, every idiot who starts a war brings up Hitler and how non-violence would never have stopped Hitler.
I was reflecting on what a total load of bullshit that is. The truth is, if different things happened there's no way to know what would have happened. All we know is what did happened lead to what follows. That's it. That's not very much. But I can, myself, think of any one of a number of situations where maybe Hitler could have been stopped (or preempted), without violence. In particular, I reflect on the punishing nature of the Treaty of Versailles. It is widely understood that the humiliating nature of Versailles was one of the chief antagonizing forces of the German people, which helped Hitler get power. If Versailles never happened, it could quite possibly stopped Hitler, or someone like Hitler, from coming to power. Likewise, if the League of Nations hadn't had its throat cut by fearful cries of losing “sovereignty”, maybe there would have been an international body where the German people could get the aid for their shattered economy and redress to the terrible conditions imposed by Versailles. Of course, maybe these things would not have worked, but we don't know. All we do know is what happened didn't work, it didn't stop war, not that a different, better peaceful solution would not have worked.
But because in one situation the peaceful solution didn't work, it . . . therefore is inevitable that we must go to war? Nonsense. There is no reason to think that there were no non-violent solutions to the problem of German aggression in the 20th century, just that those we employed at that time did not work. |
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| Copenhagen climate stuff |
[Dec. 18th, 2009|10:39 pm] |
I've drafted and deleted two long posts about why it was inevitable that the Copenhagen talks failed. I mean, the simple reason they failed is that rich nations don't want to fix what they broke and are in the crassest and most cynical way imaginable trying to use climate as a way to further economic imperialism with trade schemes that amount to turning whole countries into the indentured servants of the rich.
But all of that seems so obvious, even though I don't read it in the straight news or hear it in the commentary. It just seems so obvious to me that rich nations burned our way to tremendous wealth and now that we shouldn't be burning anything want to keep our wealth while denying poor countries the same rights that we used to become as rich as we are. For centuries we've told them to do what we did to become rich - which involves a lot of burning of things - and now we're telling them, ha-ha, just joking, you can't do that, it appears if everyone did what we do that the world will melt. Then we give no meaningful alternatives . . . which means that they will always be poor and we will always be rich.
Just like it is equally obvious that this whole process is a sham. It's not designed to succeed, but instead designed to allow rich nations to keep as much money as they can for as long as possible - even at the risk of killing . . . a whole lot of people. Perhaps even themselves. But we invent this "process" and say that unless you follow the process no progress can be made - full well knowing that the process will go nowhere. But, shhh, don't say it aloud.
The whole process, like every other ostensibly democratic process on earth, seems irredeemably poisoned by money and profit. I find it all disgusting. |
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| Metroid Prime Corruption frustration |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|01:14 am] |
I got Metroid Prime Corruption – the third Metroid Prime game – and after about 20% of it, I think I'm done with it.
I really loved the first Metroid Prime game. It had exploration, puzzles and while parts were challenging, I didn't really get lost during any of the big boss fights.
First off, there were a lot fewer of them in Metroid Prime. I just checked the FAQ on it and . . . about half as many bosses. And, generally, the bosses were of the “avoid the bosses attacks and return fire”. In Metroid Prime, the most difficult boss – the Omega Pirate – was defeated by blowing off his armor and then shooting him. Then he'd go and get his armor back on. You had to do this four times.
In the boss battle in Corruption that's stopping me from playing the game, after about 20% complete, mind you, you've got to shoot these orbs embedded in this giant robot's armor – half the time they're not accessible – while dodging the eight different attacks this cat has. And you've got to be careful because sometimes he'll heal himself, you can stop it, but it can be hard to see in the middle of a fight, but he can definitely undo your progress. After you've destroyed the orbs, you then have to go into “hypermode” - which drains your hit points – to destroy the sockets the bulbs were in. Well, when you destroy one socket, the boss becomes invulnerable while a super material covers his feet and you've got to turn into your ball mode and use ground bombs to blow the stuff off – unfortunately for you, he had a stomp attack that you can't avoid in ball mode. So your strategy is to follow the guy around in ball mode and when he stops drop some bombs and then quickly transform back to normal to try to jump his stomp attack . . .
You might be noticing this is a little more complex than “shoot off his armor and then shoot him”. Yeah, it is. The FAQ I read about the bosses says . . . this guy is about average for a boss fight. Some are harder. All of them have these weird levels of complexity. So, one of the boss fights is against at turret and the turret is invulnerable until, at this critical moment, you blow someone into it's barrel, then you've got to do something else to attack the turret, which then becomes invulnerable . . . just again and again you have to do multiple things.
I've noticed this about a lot of franchises. The subsequent games are just harder. Like they've expected my ability to have improved subsequently or something. Someone thought, “You know what was wrong about the first Metroid Prime? It was too easy. We need more and harder boss fights. We need boss fights that last an hour, that involve the players doing inscrutable things that we won't tell them about – oh, no, they'll have to figure it out in game.” The same thing happened with the previous generation of Prince of Persia games. The first one was great, just amazing, everyone loved it, and the other two were just . . . harder. The same thing also happened in the Grand Theft Auto III and VI games; the first one was great, but every subsequent one became more difficult.
There really seems to be a lot of people who design video games who think that an increase in difficulty means a better game. Or they have some bizarre notion that because you played one of the games a year ago you've somehow gotten better at that type of game. No, I haven't. I'm pretty much as good as I'm ever going to get at shooting games. This is it.
But it's the power of a franchise. I really liked Metroid Prime. It was a fun and interesting game. Metroid Prime Echoes was turned into a much harder game, and even a frustrating one where one missed jump could have the player spending ten minutes getting back to the place they jumped. Metroid Prime Corruption continues the trajectory – just make the fights harder. But in the process, they start to leave people like me behind, people who were already at the upper limits of their ability.
I understand what they're trying to do. They don't want all the boss fights to be “shoot him, then shoot him some more”. But the way they chose to do this was by adding complexity to a frenetic situation. Yes, the boss fights become more distinct but they also become harder.
A lot of this of this goes back to the idea of catering to the “hardcore” gaming crowd. For decades, now, these guys have been the driving force of the industry. They made up most of the players and pretty much all the designers. The rest of it goes back to the guys designing coin op games, who definitely made subsequent games harder because they wanted you to drop more quarters into their games. I know that some of the people designing these games are “figuring it out”. The most recent Prince of Persia game . . . well, you couldn't die. You could be in a boss fight and step away from the console for an hour and when you got back, your guy would still be alive. Some people said it ruined their experience but . . . to judge by sales, most were more interested in finishing the game than anything else. And because it was pointless to try to make Prince of Persia hard, they had to try to make it interesting, instead.
Playing through Okami, recently, I felt the same way. The game wasn't hard. But, man, I loved it. However, the final boss battle was long – about half an hour – but by the time I reached it, I had fifteen extra lives. I could have died fifteen times and still finished the fight. (I didn't die once.) Did I feel gypped by the fact that the boss fight was not, by any objective standard, hard? No. Okami is one of the greatest games ever made.
What is additionally frustrating is that this is the Metroid Prime game made for the Wii. They're supposed to be the guys on this stuff! To make playable games. But for a person of my skill, the game isn't playable. It's just hard. I'm sure that with sufficient perseverance I could finish it but . . . it's a video game, not a life quest.
The additionally frustrating thing is that Metroid Prime is a great shooter, it really cashed in on the promise of a good Wii shooter . . . if it had any notion that maybe some of the people who played Metroid Prime didn't think it was too easy. But that's the power of a brand label, isn't it? I didn't like Metroid Prime Echoes, but I still got Corruption. I guess I'm just a sucker. |
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| High minded liberals! |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|01:39 am] |
I was reading this article about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. I, of course, don't think that the Nobel Peace Prize is worth anything at all. I mean, for fuck's sake, Kissinger got this dog. Kissinger. This guy is in part responsible for the deaths of around two million people, this unrepentant warmonger, and he gets the Nobel Peace Prize . . .
Okay, I've registered my disgust with the Nobel committee. Who knew that a prize made by a huge fucking warmonger, that'd be Nobel, who killed a lot of Americans with landmines, would be hypocritical? I wish that Nobel had soothed his conscience by getting out of arms dealing instead of making some silly, corrupt prize . . . oh, damn, I'm supposed to be done registering my disgust with the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm really done for this post. Promise.
Anyway, Mr. Kettle says that Obama recognizes politics is messier than high minded liberals in America . . .
Man, that was a full stop for me. I know a lot of liberals. I'm not one, myself, because somewhere to the left of Marx, but I know a bunch of people like that, and what consistently strikes me about liberals in America is that they're not particularly high minded. That they do not, generally, vote their consciences, that they will, time and again, hold their nose and press the lever for the Democratic candidate, no matter how much of a dog he might be. That they do not, in fact, demand of their party anything high minded at all. So, neither in the past two Presidential elections, neither Kerry nor Obama was held to actually being anti-war. A lot of anti-war Democrats supported these pro-war candidates. Neither Kerry nor Obama are being held to proposing a real single payer health care option, even though about 60% of Americans want one, even after hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising to convince them otherwise. Right now, we're seeing this intensely embarrassing climate conference going on in Copenhagen, where the US is torpedoing any meaningful reform . . . while “high minded” liberals don't say a word.
Indeed, probably my biggest problem with the Democrats is that none of them are honestly high minded. You see a bunch of that over on the Republican side of things – people who passionately believe in capitalism, even when they're on the fuzzy end of the stick of it. They have profound beliefs about the way the world ought to be and they'll hold their politicians feet to the fire to get their way. The current Teabagger movement (I can hardly type those words without a laugh, hehe, teabaggers, hehe) is merely the most recent incarnation of this, but you can go back to the Reagan revolution, Gingrich's Contract with America, so forth and so on, and see time and again the abiding passion with which Republicans approach the political process. I profoundly disagree with conservative Republicans, of course, even moreso than liberal Americans, though I often would rather talk to conservatives because, y'know, we can be clear: we disagree. With liberals, it can frustrate me intensely because we seem to agree but the people they vote for and support act almost diametrically opposed to their expressed values and they keep electing these people!
So, honestly, I have no idea where a person would get the least little impression that American liberals are high minded. I actually think the party would be better off if more of them were high minded, but I have trouble finding a liberal who doesn't talk about politics in a very realpolitick sense . . . a term coined by Kissinger, I should note. |
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| Still hate Thanksgiving |
[Nov. 27th, 2009|12:01 pm] |
I managed to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to post this post.
I don't like Thanksgiving. I prefer my holidays, how do I say this? Genocide free. I don't think there's any need to have holidays with the specter of genocide over them.
Some people will try to argue that isn't the case. I think that's nonsense. The historical associations are clear. We all know the story of those Plymouth settlers who were helped by those friendly Indians to survive the hard winters. We have seen it in a dozen pageants as children and we are certainly bombarded with those images via the media.
the United American Indians of New England, the actual descendants of those helpful Indians, call this, instead, the National Day of Mourning. The effects of the racism of the colonists are present in these communities to this day. If there's a more discriminated group of people in the United States, I don't know who they are – but I do know that American Indians are insufficiently educated, face massive unemployment, poverty (with all the attendant ills that go along with it) and repression (an American Indian is about twelve times as likely to be a felon as a white person in the United States). Thanksgiving is a mockery of the incredible suffering that those colonists caused the Indians and that the United States continues to cause.
Quite frankly, it has all the taste that Germans putting their national day of thanksgiving on the dates of the Krystallnacht. It would clearly be offensive and they would have the sense not to do it.
People might also want to argue that it's a convenient day to spend time with family members. This is true. But so what? The idea that convenience is almighty is . . . the source of many of America and the world's ills. Your family can figure out some other day to see each other, for crying out loud. Considering how much effort goes into Thanksgiving, it'd be acceptable to spend a little time organizing.
People might also say that it isn't important enough to fight. Well, UAINE disagrees and I agree. The fashion of Thanksgiving is an insult to them and the history of the United States. We should have a National Day of Mourning, to remember what price has been paid so that we might, today, have this fabulously wealthy country. Our wealth has been bought with oceans of blood and suffering.
I, myself, would suggest that the family get together structure that is currently organized around Thanksgiving be organized, instead, around Martin Luther King Day. Now he's an American! Though flawed, as humans are, he spent the greater part of his life to fight for freedom, peace, an end to racism and poverty – he gave his life for this cause. His life carries a positive message, a great message, even, and I can think of no American I respect more than Martin Luther King (with the possible exception of Thoreau).
However, most people won't even seriously consider this because, to most people, the very idea of it is absurd. Thanksgiving is . . . Thanksgiving. It has all this . . . tradition. Which is my point. If it was easy to abandon, it could be abandoned – but it's not easy to abandon and there are reasons behind this. But those reasons point back to the National Day of Mourning, they point back to Indians who helped the very colonists survive that would, in later years, kill them, chase them from their lands, put them into concentration camps, that they would be and still are a colonized people. (Not even post-colonial – Indians in America are still completely caught up in colonialism.) The reason we hold onto this holiday is tradition and that tradition, I argue, continues to have meaning and continues to be an insult to the oppressed. |
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| Blurb on the origin of free will |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|01:22 am] |
I'm reading a bio on Hegel, cleverly named Hegel: A Biography, and as you must, the author goes on at some length on the connection between Hegel and Kant. Both of them stress the importance of freedom and will.
It was reflecting the other day (poor Peter to be saddled with all of this, hehe, Adrienne is at least no longer surprised at it) that the concept of free will, in the modern sense, is not obvious or universal. Classical and early medieval civilizations had all these words that we still kinna use but whose fuller meaning has been diminished by the concept of will – fate, destiny, doom, wyrd, kismet. The sense in which all of these things are similar is their inevitability. You can't change your fate/destiny/doom/wyrd/kismet. Not possible. We are all the plaything of forces greater than us – the gods, necessity, call it what you will. People are not free, or at least, not terribly free. We may choose, perhaps, on how we face the gallows, though this belief was not universal, either.
The concept of free will, as opposed to political freedom or liberty as understood in the Euro-classical period, developed, I believe, primarily as a response to Christianity. Christianity stresses that one must choose Jesus, particularly after the Reformation. It is understood, then, that people are completely free to make this decision to be saved, because if we are not free, then Christianity is a theological boggle – if we are not wholly and completely free to choose Jesus, then some people are born damned, which is hardly a good viewpoint for a religion that teaches their god is omnibenevolent.
This notion that we have a free will, however, was not immediately apparent. It is a social construct created by the theological demands of universalist monotheistic religions. It wasn't obvious to people in the classical era, nor people in non-universalist, non-monotheist religions. To this day in Hinduism there is a strong belief that we all live sixty-four thousand lives, leading to our non-being. It's all set. There is nothing we can do to change it. It's our destiny. In Buddhism, the destruction of the ego – the will – is paramount, and the will is an illusion, anyway. In Taoism, an egoless non-action is stressed, to act naturally without thought. Will, as understood in the modern West, is not apparent to most of the world outside the two big monotheistic religions. It's a construct created to fit a particular theology.
But in the West, even Nietzsche repeats the essentially Christian party line about the freedom of will. We can choose anything, Nietzsche says. Oh, dear, really? It is ironic that Nietzsche could never rid himself of his functionally Christian derived paradigm! He read all that Buddhism and classical literature and he couldn't abandon the concept of the “free will”. Part of the problem with a free will, of course, is all the things we can't imagine as choices. Nietzsche was a creative guy, but he never examined the origin of the concept of free will, instead taking it as an obvious granted, axiomatic, even though it isn't.
I'm mostly writing this down for, well, two reasons. First is reinforce in my own mind that free will is an essentially Christian and Muslim construct in the West, for theological reasons. Their religions need “free will” to be theologically meaningful in any sense. Secondly, to remind myself that even atheists in the West operate in a functionally Christian cultural paradigm. There are all of these shadows of god all over the place – behaviors derived from our Christian history that we don't have the wit or creativity to link to Christianity. |
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| Beefy revelation |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|05:20 pm] |
The last time I bought hamburger I was a little horrified at the cost. It then occurred to me that the hamburger that is most expensive - the lean stuff - often comes from the cheapest cuts of meat, that are both lean and tough. Since I have a meat grinder, well, I decided to stop buying hamburger and make it myself. That's not the revelation.
The revelation is that I am sitting her thinking, "Hey, I can put spices in the hamburger!" That's the revelation. ;) |
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| Breath in, breath out |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|12:48 am] |
You know what's important to a weightlifter. Breathing. Oh, sure, it's important to everyone else to, but I have a stupid story, hehe.
For the two months since I've returned to lifting, I was trying to take sets in a measured way. In case you don't know, when lifting, on the down stroke you inhale and on the up stroke, the harder one where you're fighting gravity, you exhale. I was going pretty slow which meant I was breathing slow, albeit deeply.
But you know what the human body runs on? Air. You breath slowly while lifting weights and you starve yourself for oxygen. If you lift fast, you breath faster, meaning you get more air. Thus, you can lift more easily, and more weight.
Why was I going slow? Form. Particularly for exercises you do when standing up, it's easy to get swing into whatever you're doing. Go slower and you can more easily control the form. It's actually a good idea to go slow, too, because it works the muscles in a different way, but I should have been aware what I was doing. It's amazing the things you forget. |
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| House insurance bill |
[Nov. 8th, 2009|05:54 pm] |
I've got mixed feelings about the health care bill that passed in the House. I mean, on one hand, it's a stinker. It's expensive in an inefficient way, more concerned with keeping insurance companies profitable rather than helping people. I deeply dislike the whole bit where people will be forced to get insurance or face additional taxes, which is idiotic – if you're too poor to pay for insurance you're going to be further taxed?! In addition to being stupid and cruel it is also regressive. Also, it won't cover everyone. They admit to about ten million Americans not being covered, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't closer to twenty million due to the various pressures that will be put on people not to use the system (many Americans avoid public assistance because it marks them in other people's eyes as welfare kings or queens, and any regulatory process dependent on proving one's poverty to a government official is humiliating). Lastly, it has no chance of working in the long run. Because it serves, primarily, as a prop for the faltering health insurance agencies and big pharma, because it's in the bill that the government can't negotiate for lower prices and by design the government insurance will have no price advantage over private insurance, it will not control costs. We'll be here, again, in ten or so years with health costs eating about a quarter of our collective income.
On the other hand, it might get a bunch of people insured. That's a pretty big other hand. The number will be, quite likely, around twenty million (I think the 36 million the government claims is going to turn out to be an exaggerated estimation).
If I was in the House, I wouldn't have voted for the bill, though. I think that the incrementalist approach doesn't work, here. The problem is private insurance companies. The only solution that can possibly work is a solution that reduces private insurance to irrelevance. Only then, with the government as the insurer, reducing overhead to about a tenth of private insurers, and able to negotiate en masse for drug treatments and streamline efficiency through the system will costs be gotten under control. |
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